FLOWER POWER

With their colourful blooms and scintillating scents, flowers are a natural mood booster. From stunning wedding bouquets to delicate edible flowers, Stephanie Bateman e-meets four smallholders who make a living from a variety of flower-growing initiatives

- Stephanie Bateman

Nestled in an expanse of rolling Worcestershire countryside, Anna Brian’s Sandal Lodge, on the outskirts of Droitwich, is a little piece of smallholding heaven.

A sandy-coloured gravel driveway leads you through a set of gates, past paddocks with contentedly munching goats and down to a traditional farmhouse and numerous outbuildings. It’s not until you reach this point that you realise the holding’s main business — flower growing, or, more specifically, Flowers By Anna.

A well-stocked cutting garden sits resplendent in between barns, perfectly sheltered from the elements and hosting rows of well organised flower varieties, while a wooden-framed polytunnel houses neat lines of more mature plants, these closer to picking time.

Neat rows of beds line the polytunnel’s soil floor, organised into small blocks of different species, with square netting helping to divide and order their growth. In one corner bright blue cornflowers, already at shoulder-height, are loosely contained with a belt of baler twine as they reach skyward to get their share of the sunlight streaming in through the plastic tunnel cover.

Potting tables are full of seedlings ready to be sown into the ground, while more tables hold vases and jars of stunning flower arrangements, freshly prepared this morning and ready for collection by clients.